Re: 3rd RfD: Mass-deletion of moderated groups without a moderator

In <vquse4$3d1t6$1@dont-email.me> D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> writes:

On 3/13/25 8:42 AM, Paul W. Schleck wrote:

>
 
- Ethical considerations
 
What if you just wind up automatically relaying off-topic material and
SPAM?  What if some or all of the content is unlawful [...]

I expect that a reasonable person would shut off the robo-moderator in
that event.

I expect that a reasonable person would not be able to react in time to
an unpredictable and short-duration SPAM or flooding incident and the
automatically approved articles would post to the newsgroups unimpeded.
For a slow or no traffic newsgroup, the approved articles would be
mostly or all SPAM and flooding, which still exists on moderator
submission addresses, even post-Google Groups.  Shutting off the
robo-moderator would be closing the gate after the horse bolted.

Do we expect the administrators of this robomoderation gateway to employ
sophisticated monitoring and alerting, and that they would respond
quickly to any incident, 24/7?  That's a lot to ask.  Furthermore, if
they do shut off the robo-moderator, what do they do with any rejected
submissions after shutoff?  Dump all of them?  Queue them up to manually
go through them to pick out only the approvable ones?

Such a service would realistically have to employ monitoring/alerting,
SPAM filtering, keyword trapping, duplicate detection, rate limiting,
and manual review of any queued articles for false positives. This is
starting to resemble the duties of a human moderator, and a significant
workload for one volunteer long-term.

--
Paul W. Schleck
pschleck@panix.com